Heading: (African American, 1863)
Author: Thomas, William Russell
Title: Letter from a Williams College student to his father with impassioned argument against slavery
Place Published: Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Publisher:
Date Published: 1863
Description: Autograph Letter Signed, with original mailing envelope. 8 pp. To his father, Chauncey Thomas, Shohola, Pennsylvania. Feb. 28, 1863.One month after the Emancipation Proclamation, William Thomas and his father - a wealthy Pennsylvania merchant and stalwart Democrat - had been arguing by letter about the anti-slavery movement, which the father felt had divided the country and unfairly maligned the South. To which the son had responded with such strong words that he now asked "to be forgiven" if he had "injured your feelings". Reminding his father that "I have heard you say" that slavery is wrong" and "it is the moral duty of every man to denounce it", he conceded that other men, even in the North, had the "right of free speech" to "praise" slavery, but only "within the bounds of the Constitution" and not condoning "treason which a government has the right to suppress". Citing historical evidence that Washington had denounced slavery and might "now be called an abolitionist" and that Jefferson had spoken of barbarous Southern slave-owners whose "boisterous passions", had deprived them "of every moral sentiment", the son felt "a feeling of duty I owe to my country to prevent you ... from being numbered with the Copperhead Party of the North", but would embrace the principles of Jefferson and Jackson and wartime pro-Union Democrats like "Andy" Johnson. "And when the rebellion is crushed, as sure it will be, when the powers of the Constitution shall again be respected over our whole country, then the fate which shall be meted out to secessionists and traitors will only be equaled by the scorn, indignation, and execution of a justly indignant people upon Copperheads and Copperheadism which, while the country was all but strangled beneath the folds of a wicked, gigantic, and damnable rebellion, was willing to make peace with Rebels, even at the expense of country, Union, Constitution, right, law, humanity, justice, and freedom..."
In this eloquently written letter, William Thomas reveals the literary talent which would later make him the most prominent newspaper editor of Colorado, his journalistic career begun after graduation of Williams as reporter for the Chicago Tribune, owned (on the other side of the family) by his uncle, a friend of Lincoln's, ardent Republican, Lt. Governor of Illinois and organizer of a Civil War Negro Regiment commanded by his brother, who would be killed in action.

Very good.